Working Together in Region VI
From Summer 1996Volume III, Number 2
Collaboration is an incremental thing. It takes a series of incremental steps before people from different disciplines can work together and meet common goals.
-Salvadore Mier
In Region VI, Salvadore Mier is using a NHTSA cooperative agreement to help states take these steps and form multidisciplinary teams to reduce motor vehicle-related injuries and fatalities.
"In each state, first I meet separately with highway safety professionals and then with public health injury prevention professionals," said Mier. "This helps me get a feel for what each group is doing and identify areas where they might work with one another. Then we hold joint brainstorming sessions with representatives from both agencies."
"It was a discovery for both agencies," said Sue Dixon, assistant director of Louisiana's Office of Highway Safety, of Louisiana's first brainstorming session. "We explained how we could break our data down. Not only can we tell that we have a certain number of fatalities, for example, but we can also identify where these occurred, to what age groups, what the causes were, and so on."
The public health agencies also use these meetings as an opportunity to explain the public health model and how it can be applied to injury prevention. "First, the public health folks explain how they apply the public health model to communicable diseases, and then they demonstrate how it works for addressing motor vehicle injuries," said Mier.
As a direct result of these brainstorming sessions, several states have taken the first steps toward collaborative projects. In Louisiana, the Office of Highway Safety recently transferred four years of police crash data to the Office of Public Health, where epidemiologists are analyzing the data to look at health and prevention implications. Although the two agencies had shared data in the past for specific projects, this is the first time that a complete database has been transferred and merged with vital records data to drive state-specific interventions.
Part of what has made this joint project so successful is a history of working together. "We've always had a really good relationship with the highway safety office," said David Lawrence, epidemiology supervisor at the Louisiana Office of Public Health. "Whenever either office is planning an injury prevention program, the other office knows about it, and we try to make it dovetail with what the other agency is doing," he added. "This data sharing is something we've talked about doing in the past. I think it would have happened eventually, but the meetings with Sal Mier served to accelerate it. His weekly calls and e-mail keep it in the front of our minds.
Sue Dixon also pointed out that the meetings have enhanced the kind of informal sharing that helps professionals do their jobs more effectively: "A lot of times, we are just names on a memo or a voice on the phone. But once you meet people in person and get to know them, it makes for better working relationships. It's a lot easier now to call them up and say, 'Look what I've discovered today.'" The two Louisiana agencies will meet again this summer to review the results of the data sharing and identify where each group might refocus its traffic safety efforts.
Other states in the region are also exploring opportunities to combine efforts on specific projects. In Texas, the state highway safety and public health agencies will work together to develop a pilot project that combines the Safe Communities concept with the World Health Organization's Healthy Communities approach. In Arkansas, traffic safety and public health agencies will meet to review the health department's report, the Status of Injury in Arkansas, and develop recommendations for addressing motor vehicle injuries.
Mier also advises that federal support is essential to help states continue to build joint initiatives. Region VI demonstrates that sort of support by modeling collaboration at the regional level. The NHTSA regional office and the regional office of the Maternal and Child Health Bureau (MCHB) are jointly overseeing this cooperative agreement, an indication of their history of working together. The two offices have long been active participants in each other's conferences and regional meetings, served on joint task forces, and kept each other aware of their activities.
When asked why the two regional offices have been able to work together so successfully, Linda Marquardt of the Region VI MCHB office replied, "A huge part of it is Jeff [Dismukes, program manager of the NHTSA Region VI office]. He's very open. He sees that public health has a role in traffic injury prevention, and he sees the big picture." She added, "NHTSA is also very good about including us in their activities. For example, they've asked me to serve on the planning committee for the regional Moving Kids Safely workshop. And whenever we have regional MCHB meetings, Jeff is one of the crowd."
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Revised: October 25, 1996
